


Not Her Castle

by ishtarelisheba



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Emotional Abuse, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 11:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2579576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishtarelisheba/pseuds/ishtarelisheba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Young Lady Colette and her early marriage to Sir Maurice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Her Castle

“Lady Colette, your father would have a word with you.” Her nurse peeked into her rooms, informing her of his summons. 

Colette quickly kicked the pair of breeches beneath her bed, as if the older woman didn’t know of them. “Papa is home?” she asked, lighting up.

“Do dress in something proper before you go downstairs,” the nursemaid fussed gently, looking at the sturdy men’s blouse that the young woman who was once under her charge still wore.

Colette pulled skirts and a bodice that could be laced down the front from her clothing chest, and she hurried. It had been weeks since she’d laid eyes on her father. He’d been visiting a fellow knight whose lands bordered their own, working out some manner of business. After dressing, she flew down the stairways and corridors in the direction of his study.

The doors were open when she skidded to slow herself, and he held his arms open, expecting her. She ran to him, flinging her arms around his neck as she did when she was a little girl, and he lifted her off her feet just the same.

“I have something very important to discuss with you,” her father said, and set her down again. His face was quite somber when she looked up at him, and she understood then that his trip had been more than simple business.

Colette sat on the edge of his desk as he paced the width of the room in front of her and explained. She listened in silence, hands folded in her lap as her mother taught her a lady should.

Only five years had her mother been gone from them, and the entire household missed her as terribly now as they had on the night that Lady Aurélie died in childbed. Colette had been all of twelve and her brother barely fifteen, close enough in age, but their mother’s death affected them differently. Cyril had grown very serious afterward, ceasing to entertain his sister’s ‘childishness’ or engage in her fantasies of adventure as he had throughout their childhood. Colette, on the other hand, threw herself into such things all the harder. She remained the light of her father’s household, outgoing and bubbly, continuing to steal her brother’s trousers to go on adventures up trees in the gardens, then just beyond the castle - though not so far that the curtain wall fell out of sight - and then all the way into the village. Her father doted on her, scolded her for her tomboyishness, though there was very little seriousness behind it, and he eventually ensured that she had breeches of her own fit for her galavanting. 

Then the Ogres War began encroaching on the second fiefdom over, and she was no longer allowed beyond the castle walls without an escort. It was only a year after that she was betrothed to Sir Maurice. He was a good fifteen years older than Colette, but that wasn’t what gave her doubts about her father’s arrangement for her. Nor was it his portly frame; she had met many kind men who enjoyed rich meals. She had seen this particular knight from a distance, however, and never had a desire to be closer. He was smug, ridiculing, controlling. He treated women as if they were below him, even as a guest in their castle. How could her father, whom she trusted with every secret and wish since the loss of the most important person in both of their lives, give her to this man?

For a month, while the wedding arrangements were prepared and guests traveled to attend, she dwelt on it day and night. When she could stand it no longer, she went to her father to ask the question she hadn’t asked the day he told her of her fate. Why?

She found him in his study with his head in his hands, and when she asked, he wept and apologized to her. He had also been distraught over her betrothal, and hidden it just as well as she had. “There is no other way,” he lamented, holding onto one of her hands with both of his. “If I had the luxury of allowing you to court and choose, I would, my darling. The war - we’ll be overrun in six months, at most, without more soldiers on our borders. Sir Maurice’s men, they’ll be able to join with ours and protect both, to better fend off the ogres.” Tears filled his eyes again and he squeezed her hand. “I am sorry, _ma belle ange_ , I’m so sorry…”

She asked no more. She understood, and she steeled herself to it. She would be a good wife. She’d seen how her mother was - loving, a confident Lady, a wife who stood by her husband and gave her people someone to look up to and depend upon. Colette could do that, too.

++ + ++

The wedding was a grand affair. It was a winter event, and the cloak and slippers she wore with her wedding dress when she left her home were lined with soft rabbit fur to keep her warm. Her mother had given her a talk about what was expected of a wife, the joys that a woman could find with her husband, but that was little like what occurred on Colette’s wedding night. It seemed perfunctory. Quick and ungentle, and left her feeling empty.

In Sir Maurice’s castle, she felt bound. She did stitchwork, and mended clothing for the children of the castle servants with her ladies in waiting, looking forward to this minstrel or that happening in to entertain in exchange for a few days of room and board to break up the routine. It numbed her mind, everything moved so slowly, when she was accustomed to a life of running about wherever she pleased. Here, she wasn’t allowed into the village at all. Her breeches had mysteriously disappeared from her belongings the day after her things were put away. She wrote to her father and brother, but was unsure whether her letters arrived whole, and some at all, judging by the responses she received. She’d thought perhaps it might be different, being the Lady of a castle in her own right, but she felt less a Lady and more a possession each day.

On a freezing day filled with rain and sleet beating against the castle windows, when she wasn’t allowed into the gardens, Colette set about exploring the castle. She looked in corners of the dining hall that she hadn’t paid attention to before. She visited the kitchens and was fed sweets by the wizened old head cook, and ate her mignardises as she watched the woman’s knobbled fingers form the prettiest pie crust edge she had ever seen. She wandered the halls, trying the handles of doors she knew not to be private quarters, looking into storage rooms, and found herself hustled out of the treasury before she could so much as speak a word. So many doors were locked against her. A loop back through the center of the keep took her near Sir Maurice’s war room. She didn’t want to put herself in his path, and stopped before she got to the open door, trying to think of an alternate route with what she had learned of the castle’s corridors thus far. 

There was laughter, and the sound of cups bumping on the table, and she heard her husband’s voice. “Had I known she was such a backward girl before I was saddled with her...” he said without humor in his speech. “There’s no wondering at why Sir Michel wanted shot of her.”

Colette reeled away before she heard more, hurrying back through hallways without thinking where her feet were going. _He_ had been saddled with _her_? That was how he saw the arrangement? She turned a corner, her eyes stinging with angry tears, trying every handle in her path to find a place to hide herself while she cried.

She found herself at the termination of a hallway, at a pair of tall wooden doors in what she thought might be the south wing. They were stuck tight, and she pulled at the handles until she began to fear she might get into trouble for it. She looked around, listening carefully, but there was nothing. Colette frowned. No matter that Sir Maurice constantly made her feel like she would never belong here, this was her home, as well. She would be here for the rest of her days, as unhappy a thought as that currently was. Why should she worry about exploring her own home? It made her angrier, that she had been made to feel like a visiting child told not to meddle. She forgot her tears in her interest and consternation with the stubborn door. Dusting the rust from the handle off on her skirts, she turned sideways and braced her feet against the floor, and she tried again. She pushed her shoulder against the door, above the handle as she tried it, and the door finally gave way, almost toppling her into the great, dusty room as it flew open. She windmilled her arms, regaining her footing, and smiled triumphantly.

Upon looking around, she knew immediately what the room was. _A library_. It was in pitiful shape, though, and painfully obvious that no one had cared about it in a very long time. She wondered if anyone else in the castle even knew of its existence. A heavy layer of dust covered every single thing inside. Half of the shelves had collapsed, leaving books piled on the floor, splayed as if they had attempted and failed at taking flight. She bent to pick up a book bound in blue cloth with its title in giltwork from the top of one of the piles, blowing the dust away first before clearing more with her hand. _Her Handsome Hero_. Colette smiled. A romance. She placed it on one of the unbroken shelves and began doing the same to more of the fallen books. There were more romances, yes, but also histories, adventures, books on alchemy and gardening and astronomy. It wasn’t an enormous library, selection-wise, but it was charmingly eccentric in its variation.

The next day, she enlisted the aid of her ladies and cleaned the room from ceiling to floor, and even managed to clean the door handles of their rust by removing them from the door and soaking them in bowls of vinegar. One of the kitchen maids brought up a little cup of grease to quiet the hinges, and the head cook’s son took a few moments to pry the boards off the windows for her. They had to stack books on the floor, as the fallen shelves were too dry rotted to be repaired. The whole ones were in similar condition, and groaned with the shelves only half full. She needed to replace them, but she had no access to a carpenter, nor money to pay one. Anything she wanted extraneous from her everyday needs, she had to ask from her husband.

“Come and help me clean up?” she asked one of her ladies while the rest fussed about with the library, all also happy to be doing something other than sitting with needlepoint in their laps for a while.

She got into the dress that made her most uncomfortable - a green off the shoulder confection which, conveniently, was the one that made her husband smile in a way that made her stomach drop - and her lady’s maid tidied her hair. She had asked Sir Maurice for precious little in the month she’d been here, always afraid there would be something demanded in return for a perceived kindness. But this was important, somehow, in a way she couldn’t quite lay a finger on.

She asked an audience with her husband and sat outside the war room for an hour, waiting for him to have time for her. Sure enough, when she stepped in, that smile spread over his face. He cleared the room of advisors and soldiers, and closed the door behind them. “What is it you want, wife?” he asked, arms stretched to clasp his hands behind him as he descended on her.

Colette didn’t shrink away this time. She stood her ground. “I found something - the library - and I thought I might get it into better repair.”

The smile dropped from his face. “Oh. That monstrosity,” he muttered dismissively. “You have better things to do with your time than fool about with that pile of trash.”

“The books themselves are in excellent shape,” she said, feeling compelled to defend them, and turned to follow him as he walked around her and back to his place at the table. “It’s only the shelves that are damaged.”

Sir Maurice took his seat again, leaning back in the chair. “And I suppose you want _me_ to pay to have new shelving built.”

“Yes, if you please.”

He leaned forward again, shuffling through the maps stacked in front of him, and reached for a measuring instrument on the other side of the table.

Colette stepped quickly forward, taking the instrument and holding it out to him. “Who did it belong to?” she asked, hoping that she didn’t venture too far with the question.

He sniffed, one side of his face curling in what she was dismayed to see as derision. “My mother’s,” he virtually spat.

Colette winced at his tone. “She created a library?”

“She created a waste of time. She was obsessed with the thing, spent most of her time there, fussing over those ridiculous stories.” He reached for a lead weight and placed it at the end of the instrument, then measured again from there. “She had no time for _women’s_ pursuits. Likely what sent my father to an early grave.”

Colette bristled at the way he regarded his mother, but she pushed the feeling down. She wanted this library, and displeasing him was the surest way to see it boarded up. Or worse. “I have little to do, outside of sewing. Perhaps taking care of the library will occupy my mind.”

“Well, I hope you’ll have more than that to occupy you, before too long.” He smirked at her humorlessly, giving her stomach a pointed look before returning to his maps.

Oh, she knew he wanted sons of her. Of course he did. Didn’t every man want sons? She only hoped the moon would work out so that it took a while to happen. Despite her dislike of him, and his apparent dissatisfaction with her, she had hopes that she and Sir Maurice would eventually see eye to eye on enough to provide one another with companionship, at the very least. Perhaps they might even grow to feel affection for one another.

“Until then,” she said, in response to his remark as well as her own thoughts, and forced a sweet smile.

“Fine, fine. I’ll consult with the treasurer to see what manner of stipend I can afford. As long as it keeps you out of my hair while I work.” He flicked his hand at her, sending her away her without another word, and she was surprised when the dismissal stung.

After their discussion of the library, he reminded her often of his generosity and took his repayment out of her in ‘wifely duties.’ She received a steady library ‘allowance’ each month, small though it was.

Colette acquired clean sheets of butcher’s paper from the kitchen and sat with a sharpened coal to draw up plans for stages of construction. The most necessary repairs must be seen to first, and the shelves would be plain and functional for now, but she hoped to eventually make it a grand sight to behold. She made notes about paint colors and giltwork, fixtures for candles and tinting the windows to keep the sun from damaging the books, envisioning glorious columns and shelves that reached so high there would be need for ladders.

She hired a carpenter to build shelves enough to house the books there twice over, to provide room for the library to grow. When she inquired about whether he knew of someone who might create reliefs to attach to the doors, he was more than happy to indicate himself, an artist turned the simple carpenter that he was as necessity to feed his family. When she was ready, he would build entirely new doors for her and carve right into them, so excited he was at the prospect of having his art in the castle.

Eventually, she wanted the room to be a nice, lively green with gold here and there like the door to her rooms in her father’s castle, but the faded and scuffed red walls would do for now, now they’d been scrubbed clean. A few months into her restoration, when it became a choice between adding books or placing comfortable furniture in the library, she had a chaise, a sofa, and two chairs from her private sitting room moved in, and sent a letter of inquiry regarding the variety of books she was looking for along with one of the young knights on a trek into King Leopold’s kingdom.

Colette took to spending her days in the haven of the library, whether she read or not. She entertained visiting Ladies there, did her embroidery and mending there, and took notice that Sir Maurice never once set foot near it.

++ + ++

In the library, taking care of the enormous worlds held within the pages, she found even more solace and peace when she discovered that she was with child. The ogres were too unpredictable to travel between the two fiefdoms, and she’d seen neither her family nor friends in a year and half. Even Sir Maurice’s visitors had ceased. The quiet hours in what she had come to think of as _her_ library calmed her spirit. Her pregnancy was not a hard one, really. It was her husband who made it stressful. He declared that she was giving him a son, and brooked no conjecture that Colette might have a girl. And so she kept to herself and her ladies in waiting, only participating in conversation about the baby with him when he initiated it.

She found a book with recipes hundreds of years old, and took it to the head cook with bits of ribbon marking the things she began to crave after reading of them. She found a history of dye-making, and a half dozen books about the stars, and a novel taking place in a strange world where there was no magic at all. She found a book of oldest legends and the truth behind the centuries-twisted tales of them, and _there_ , contained in a section on inherited curses, she happened across a long, strange name that began with an ‘R’ and was followed by a warning to never speak the word aloud.

She dared not even think the sorcerer’s name, but _oh_ , the _temptation_. If he could take her to her family, if he could make Sir Maurice treat her more kindly, if he could put her fate back into her own hands… Would it be worth it, the price he exacted? Her hand inexorably strayed to her belly at those thoughts, with worry over how significant or painful his price might be, and she managed to put him out of her head for a few days more.

Colette was heavily pregnant, restricted by the midwife from moving about the castle too much, and she’d been thinking about her family for days. Her father nor brother had written her in weeks, and she couldn’t help but wonder whether her husband was now keeping their letters from her altogether. In June, he gave her a letter inviting Sir Maurice and herself to Cyril’s wedding, which took place in April. Her brother had been married more than a month and she hadn’t been allowed to know, much less given the chance to attend. The small amount of trust she had in her husband, he slowly but surely whittled away. And now the thought that her father wouldn’t be there to meet his grandchild made her heart heavy.

She heard noise from outside the door of her sitting room, and knew it to be the thump of her husband’s boots. _What does he want?_ she wondered. He hadn’t paid an evening visit to her rooms since she told him of her pregnancy, and he only asked after the baby’s health when they sat together for meals. Her lady’s maid answered when he knocked, and he brushed her easily aside to enter.

“Colette,” he said shortly, and she knew that something was wrong. He addressed her as ‘my wife’ and less frequently ‘Lady’ far more often than by her name.

“Sir Maurice,” she greeted him, letting her book rest open against her rounded stomach.

“There is news from your father’s fiefdom.”

She sat forward, attentive, and smiled. “A letter?” she asked.

“A messenger. It seems that your father’s lands have been overtaken. The castle and village were destroyed.” Sir Maurice raised his chin, looking at her as if he were more concerned with her reaction than with providing consolation.

The air seemed to disappear from her lungs, and she had to gasp a breath before she could speak. “But they were able to get to safety, my father and brother?”

“Sir Michel and Cyril died in the attack. Their bodies-”

“Their bodies,” she echoed.

“-have been interred in the family mausoleum.”

Colette held her book more tightly to her. “Their bodies…”

“You will be able to visit them, with an escort, when you are well.” Sir Maurice frowned at her.

By ‘well,’ she was aware that he meant after she gave birth, but that wasn’t the part that concerned her. “You were supposed to protect them…” she said. She spoke calmly, quietly, though it felt as if her heart were being rent from her chest.

“What?” he grunted, appearing honestly befuddled by her response.

Colette gripped the cover of her book, slowly closing it. She had a sudden compulsion to throw it at him, to scream, to cry that _he was supposed to protect them._ That was what this entire arrangement was about, joining the families together for protection and safety. It wasn’t the unseemliness that kept her from it. It was the thought of her child and the good possibility of some retaliation from him.

She turned her body away from him. “Nothing. Thank you.” It was bitter in her mouth, to thank him for such news.

He left her rooms. No consolation. No sympathy. He simply left her, shutting the door behind him. Her lady’s maid and the two ladies in waiting who had been sitting with her dropped their occupations immediately and rushed to her side as she trembled and folded forward, keening.

“No, no, my Lady, shh,” one of them cooed, raising both hands to pet her hair, trying to calm her.

Another put her arms around Colette, kneeling at her side. “Don’t grieve so hard, my Lady, please. The baby.”

She could choke back the anger and devastation in her husband’s presence, but she couldn’t stop how it tore her apart inside, and it spilled over once he was gone. Her father, her brother, gone. Her friends. Her home. Her nurse, who had given her an ear when she needed to talk about women’s things after her mother passed. All gone. She felt something inside her break and resign to this being the whole of her life now. She clasped a shaking hand over her mouth and sobbed.

And then just as quickly, she stopped, breath leaving her and a hand moving to cradle her belly in the wake of a sharp pain. The book with its blue cloth cover and gilt lettering fell from her lap to the floor.

++ + ++

A girl. So small, more than a fortnight earlier than the midwife had estimated, and Colette loved her more than life itself right away. But her husband had expected a boy. Surely, though, when he _saw_ their daughter...

Before Colette had a chance to hold her daughter, the tiny girl was washed and dressed in the frills embroidered with blue flowers that were waiting to clothe Sir Maurice’s son, wrapped in the blanket threaded around the edges with blue ribbon, and placed into her husband’s arms when he came in to hold the baby in claim of it.

“My boy,” he said proudly, jostling the baby, causing her to squall out again, and he laughed. “A healthy set of lungs he has!”

No one else was speaking, and that left it up to Colette. She found new courage in her breast. “ _She_ ,” Colette said, and cleared her throat. “We have a daughter.”

Sir Maurice looked down at the baby in confusion. “A daughter.” His expression faded into displeasure that made the seed of fear that had grown in Colette over the last months germinate more quickly. How could he look at their child that way? The same child he held and regarded with pride when he thought he had a boy?

He visibly withdrew, all but dropping the baby back into the arms of the nearest person. “Fussy as she is, I hope she isn’t sickly,” he muttered before leaving.

The midwife followed him, catching him at the door. “There were complications,” the older woman told him solemnly, her voice pitched low, but not so low that Colette’s sharp ears couldn’t hear. “It’s unlikely she’ll conceive again. That babe is the only child you’ll get.”

Sir Maurice looked over his shoulder at her, his expression turned sour. “Then I’ll just have to marry her to a suitable heir, when the time comes.” He turned away from the door, leaving it to the midwife to close it.

Colette held her daughter, touching her cheek, and the baby’s face turned immediately toward her. “He only ever discussed names for a boy,” she said, enraptured, and breathed to herself, “Gods, she’s so beautiful…”

Her lady’s maid smiled, helping to clean up, and tidied the bed around her before sitting at the edge to share her Lady’s happiness. “Well, there’s her name, then. If you like it.”

Colette thought for a moment before she nodded. “It’s fitting. And I can’t imagine a better one.” She smiled, unwrapping the snug blanket enough to bring out one of her daughter’s tiny hands, and leaned to press her lips to it. “ _Ma petite_ Belle.”


End file.
